Chương 143: What Lies Below

The elevator room sat at the far end of the fortress, past three more chambers filled with formation equipment that neither of them could understand. Leo stopped in the doorway. The room was simple. After days of incomprehensible hexagram scripts and formation arrays that made his head hurt, the simplicity was almost refreshing. A single elevator hung suspended over a shaft that descended deep into the darkness below. Unlike the massive platform that had carried them down from the surface, this one was small.

A cylindrical cage, maybe four feet in diameter, with vertical bars spaced evenly around its circumference. Room for one person. Above it, a massive winch held a chain that disappeared into the ceiling mechanism. It looked like something a mining company might use. A birdcage elevator, the kind Leo had seen in old photographs of coal mines and construction sites. Then he checked the metal with his divine sense. The bars were Deity Transformation tier material.

So were the chain links, the winch mechanism, the anchor points, and the guide rails running down the shaft walls. All of it was Tier 5. Leo let out a slow breath. For all of their advanced hexagram formations and reality-defying puppet construction, the Wardens had built their elevator the same way humans had been building elevators for centuries. The only difference was that every component could withstand forces that could tear mountains apart.

"I've been in here for about three hours," Kevin said.

"I think I've got a good handle on how everything works now."

"Did you finish all the other preparations?" Leo asked.

"Am I good to go down now?" Kevin nodded.

"I spent the past couple of days before we entered placing alert formations. I hid them in the city, on the bridges, and in the elevator shaft from the surface at the entrance of the city. As soon as the Imperial secret police start entering the ruins, the alert formations will take a picture and send a jade slip flying to you. You'll see exactly who's coming and how many." Leo nodded. He walked to the edge of the shaft and looked down. The darkness was absolute.

His divine sense extended maybe a hundred feet before the Slaughter Qi grew too thick to penetrate. Somewhere below, something waited. Leo climbed into the cage. The Deity Transformation bars felt solid under his hands, warm with residual spiritual energy. The floor was a single plate of the same material, inscribed with stabilization formations that would keep the cage from swinging during descent. Kevin stood at the control panel. His face was pale in the red light of the fortress formations.

"Leo. Be careful down there." Leo nodded.

"Thanks." He looked at Kevin for a moment.

"Don't stay too long," Leo said.

"Screenshot whatever's left in the fortress that we haven't explored. Then self-detonate." Kevin blinked.

"I thought you'd want me to log out and come back after a few weeks. See what happened. Check if anything changed." Leo shook his head.

"This place is not for the living." He gestured at the shaft below, at the Slaughter Qi rising from the depths.

"We came here to learn what we could. After we get what we need, let the dead rest." Kevin was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded.

"Stay safe."

"You too." Leo pressed the button on the elevator's control panel. The winch groaned. The chain began to move. A small barrier enveloped the elevator. The cage shuddered once, then started its slow descent into the darkness below. Kevin's figure shrank above him, lit by the red glow of the fortress formations. Then the shaft walls closed in, and Leo was alone with the sound of grinding metal and the sight of Slaughter Qi pressing against the barrier.

The black mist curled and probed, searching for gaps, but the barrier held. At least during the descent, he would not have to worry about the Slaughter Qi. He sat down in the center of the cage and went over his plans. Whatever he saw down there, he would only see with his own two eyes. He would not use his divine sense, and he would definitely not use his ortho-k vision. What waited below had corrupted an entire empire.

He planned to take a quick glance and self-detonate before anything had a chance to take root in his spiritual sea. The cage descended. Hours passed. Leo pulled up his ingame interface and opened the translations of the tablets he had saved. One of their unique advantages on the Azure Profound Continent was the ability to take screenshots and transfer files to and from their VR pod.

He and the rest of the group mainly used this ability to store the Common-English dictionary and to make drawing formations a little easier. But it was really useful in times like this, where he wanted to keep his mind occupied and not think about what he was getting himself into. He read through the translations of the tablets. Trying to find any hidden pieces of information that would have been helpful. The Wardens had been meticulous record-keepers. They documented everything. Puppet maintenance schedules.

Spirit vein output measurements. Most of it was administrative. Boring, even. But scattered through the mundane records were references to something called the "Great Silence." A period after the transformation attempt when the Emperor stopped issuing decrees. When the Palace went dark. When the Wardens began sealing facilities and activating containment protocols across the entire empire. The tablets didn't explain what had happened.

They just referenced it, over and over, as if everyone reading them would already know. Leo rubbed his eyes and kept reading. More hours passed. The cage kept descending. At some point, the unease started to build. It crept up on him slowly. A tightness in his chest. A prickling at the back of his neck. The sense that something was watching him from the darkness beyond the barrier. Leo set down the tablet translations. He tried to focus on the text, but the words blurred together.

His mind kept drifting to the impenetrable blackness below, to the weight of all that Slaughter Qi pressing down from every direction. He needed a distraction. Leo opened his personal files and scrolled through the entertainment he had downloaded. He picked one of the web serials. A cultivation story, ironically enough. He had been following it for years, but he had gotten too busy to keep up with the updates and had fallen behind. He started reading and lost himself in the story.

About a hundred chapters from catching up to the latest update, he heard the distinctive sound of jade slips flying toward him. He stood up, raised his hand, and caught them. The slips passed through the barrier without resistance. The formation was calibrated for Slaughter Qi, not physical objects. Leo read the first slip with his divine sense. He saw people in embroidered uniforms. Dark fabric with silver thread forming patterns he recognized from Lord Hollowfang's identity token. The Embroidered Guard.

The Emperor's secret police. Three Nascent Soul cultivators. Five Gold Cores. Leo's jaw tightened. This was wrong. The secret police answered directly to the Dragon Throne. They enforced Imperial Law across the continent, operating above the authority of local rules and sects. But they were still bound by the Emperor's decrees. The seal on this facility had been placed by Imperial mandate. Even the secret police were not authorized to pass through.

They should have inspected the breach, repaired the damage, and reported back to the Court. They should have left. Instead, they had descended into the ruins. Either the Dragon Throne had sent them, which meant the Emperor himself had decided the seal no longer mattered. Or someone else had sent them, which meant the Enlightened had enough authority to convince the secret police to betray the Emperor himself. Both options were terrifying.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Another jade slip struck his palm. Kevin's handwriting filled his vision.

"It's been about 18 hours since you left. I don't understand where all the chain came from. Must be a storage formation in the winch mechanism. Some kind of magical treasure that holds more than it should." A pause in the text.

"The secret police are here. I'm going to self-detonate now. Good luck down there." Leo read the message twice. Then he crushed it. A few minutes later, another slip arrived. This one came from an alert formation hidden in the city itself. It has a picture of the secret police moving as a group through the underground city, flying past the dormant puppets and the empty warehouses. They were heading directly for the fortress. Leo followed their progress as more jade slips arrived, one after another.

Then the cage shuddered. Leo grabbed one of the bars to steady himself. The tremor passed through the chain, through the winch mechanism far above, through the entire shaft. Another tremor. Stronger this time. Aftershocks. Leo had never witnessed Deity Transformation cultivators in combat. The only real reference he had was Monarch Scatterstraw. That scarecrow had reaped him like wheat. He had heard stories. He had read reports.

Many people compared the power of Deity Transformation to the power of Nascent Soul Lords facing lesser cultivators. Nascent Soul Lords, after forming their domains, could crush dozens of unprepared Gold Cores without breaking a sweat. Their domains reshaped reality itself and created environments in which lesser cultivators could not approach. As much as Leo liked to brag that he had killed six or seven Nascent Soul Lords, he knew that in a fair fight, there wasn't much he could do one on one.

The gap between Nascent Soul and Deity Transformation was greater still. Even after eighteen hours of slow descent, even with miles of Slaughter Qi between him and the fortress, he could feel the impacts. The four Deity Transformation puppets were fighting. The secret police had triggered the constructs. The elevator kept moving. The chain kept feeding down from above. That was a good sign. The winch mechanism was still intact. Leo looked up.

The shaft stretched into darkness above him, the same impenetrable black that waited below. He searched for movement. Another jade slip. Or maybe some indication that someone had survived the battle and was descending the chain to hunt him. Nothing. Just the grinding of metal on metal and the slow, steady descent into the depths.

An hour later, shapes emerged from the darkness below. Square boxes. Granite construction. Completely sealed on all sides. Each one had a thin blue formation light on top, pulsing with a steady rhythm that reminded Leo of a heartbeat. These were the corpse transformation graves of the Everlasting Empire. Leo recognized the descriptions from the translated tablets. Many Wardens, after dying, had been buried in these tombs and lowered into the depths.

Through a combination of formation work and concentrated Slaughter Qi, their bodies transformed into jiangshi. Zombie cultivators. The signature product of the Empire. Many Wardens believed this transformation granted eternal life. Foreign cultivators traveled from across the continent to be interred in the Empire's graves, hoping to cheat death through undeath. But the tablets had been divided on the subject. Some Wardens dismissed the practice as folly.

They argued that consciousness did not survive the transformation. That the people who chose to become jiangshi were deluding themselves. That what rose from the graves was not the person who had been buried, but a construct wearing their face. During the Great Silence, jiangshi production had been banned. The transformation chambers were sealed. The formation arrays were deactivated. But the Wardens who had already chosen this path still wanted their eternal rest. So the Empire compromised.

They would be buried in tombs that would never open. Sealed forever in granite boxes, where the transformation would occur but the result would never be released. These must be those boxes. The final resting places of the Wardens who had lived through the Great Silence. Within each sealed tomb, a mindless zombie cultivator raged against walls it could never break. The elevator descended deeper. More tombs rose past him. Hundreds. Then thousands.

The blue lights stretched in every direction, fading into the Slaughter Qi haze. But the lights kept coming. Layer after layer. The elevator shaft cut through a vertical cemetery that seemed to have no bottom. Leo tried to count the tombs visible in his limited field of view and gave up after the first minute. Instead he took screenshots of what he could. There must be millions. The granite changed as he went lower. At first the shift was subtle. A slight difference in color. A denser texture to the stone.

But as the elevator continued its slow descent, the quality of the materials became unmistakable. Higher tier granite. Stronger seals. Brighter formation lights. And then, far below, Leo saw them. A dozen boxes arranged in a rough circle. Each one was massive, three times the size of the tombs above. The granite was so dense it looked more like shadow than stone. On top of each box, a red formation light pulsed. The signature color of Deity Transformation. Leo's breath caught.

These were the Deity Transformation cultivators of the Empire. Some of the most powerful Wardens who had ever lived, sealed in tombs designed to contain them for eternity. Twelve of them, arranged like sentinels around something below. The elevator passed through the ring of red lights. Below the Deity Transformation tombs, a shape emerged from the darkness. A shell. The material existed in a category beyond anything he had encountered. Beyond Deity Transformation.

Beyond anything the modern cultivation world could produce. The elevator touched down with a soft thud. Leo stood on the featureless surface of the shell. Above him, the tombs of the Deity Transformation monarchs formed a ceiling of red lights. Around him, Slaughter Qi pressed against the barrier, thick enough that he could barely see ten feet in any direction. And in front of him, outside of the barrier, set into the granite shell, was a hatch. Leo did not move.

He stood inside the barrier, eight feet from the edge of the cage, and looked at the hatch. His heart was beating too fast. He had been afraid before. Many times. Fear was a familiar companion by now. The fear of Mateo's spear. The fear of a Nascent Soul Lord's domain. The fear of the wheat field, and the scarecrow, and the moment he realized he was snared in Sariya's trap in the Catacombs. This was different. Leo looked at the shell beneath his feet. The material was beyond Deity Transformation.

He didn't need his divine sense to know that. His eyes could see it. He could feel it. He was standing on the coffin of a Void Refining Eternal. The Everlasting Empire had spanned a continent. Even during the Great Silence it had produced a dozen Deity Transformation cultivators. It had controlled formations and puppet technology that had been lost to time. And all of that power, all of that civilization, all of those lives and deaths and centuries of accumulated knowledge, had been poured into one purpose.

Keeping the Eternal sealed. Leo looked at the hatch. It was eight feet away. Past the barrier. Through Slaughter Qi thick enough to corrode his meridians in seconds. Unfortunately there wasn't anything he could screenshot or record. But just in case, he activated the video recording function for now. He then thought about what would happen if this went wrong. Sure the respawn was reliable. He knew that. He had died dozens of times and came back every time, clean and whole.

But somehow he knew that corruption was different. He knew that if he got corrupted, it was over for him. This would be the end. He could just self-detonate right now. Go back to the Hidden Hideout Kevin had set up in the mountains. Work on training his divine sense. Come back years later after he had formed his divine infant. He thought about Lord Ironhorn's question. Why do you care about these people? Are you here because you wish to save them, or merely to amuse yourself with an interesting diversion?

And now he had an answer. He cared. He cared so much that he was going to risk corruption. Risk dying forever, just for one look. Because he could come back. He was the only one on the continent who could see what was inside and bring news of the Eternal back to the surface. That was the only advantage he had. The only thing that made him more qualified than anyone else in the realm. Just the simple, stupid fact that dying wasn't permanent for him. Leo closed his eyes. He took a breath. Then another one.

His plan was simple. Crawl across the shell. Open the hatch. Take one quick look inside. Self-detonate immediately. It was a terrible plan. He was going to do it anyway. His hands were shaking. The barrier membrane shimmered in front of him, thin and fragile against the pressing weight of Slaughter Qi. Beyond it, the hatch waited. Maybe eight feet away. Close enough to reach in seconds. He closed his eyes. He took one last breath and held it. Leo stepped out of the barrier. The Slaughter Qi pressed against him.

He could feel it seeping into his pores, crawling up his nostrils, trying to force its way past his clenched teeth and sealed lips. He held his breath, but it didn't matter. The Qi didn't need him to breathe. It found the gaps in his defenses anyway. The corners of his eyes. The spaces between his fingers. The soft tissue of his ears. Leo crawled. His knees scraped against the granite shell. His palms pressed flat against the cold stone.

He kept his eyes squeezed shut, navigating by touch alone, reaching forward with one hand while the other anchored him in place. The corruption was already starting. He could feel it in his meridians, a wrongness spreading through channels that had been clean moments before. Something foreign was taking root in his spiritual sea, planting seeds that would bloom into something terrible if given time. He didn't have time. That was the point. Get in. Look. Get out. His hand found the edge of the hatch.

Behind him, the chain clinked. His eyes almost snapped open on instinct. But he kept them closed. He knew that behind him, the elevator cage was rising, being pulled upward. No going back. Leo found the handle of the hatch, a simple metal ring set into the granite. He pulled. The hatch swung open. The first thing he felt was the density of spiritual qi. It poured out of the opening like water from a burst dam. It washed over him, through him, filling his lungs and his meridians and every empty space in his body.

Leo had felt something like this once before. In the Reflection Room, deep in the Catacombs, where he had established his foundation. This must be Void Refining tier Qi. Leo opened his eyes. The chamber below was vast. The granite shell extended downward into a spherical space. Chains of pure spiritual energy crisscrossed the interior, dozens of them, all converging on a single point at the center. A corpse hung in the chains. It was human-shaped. Or it had been, once.

The flesh had long since dried and cracked, pulled tight over bones that no longer remembered what it meant to be alive. But the body moved. It strained against its bindings, thrashing in slow motion, fighting constraints that had held it for thousands of years. The Great God of the Everlasting Empire. The Void Refining Eternal who had tried to transcend death and brought ruin to everything he ruled. Still struggling. Still fighting. Still refusing to die. Leo felt something shift in his mind. A pressure. A pull.

An urge that rose from somewhere deep in his consciousness, somewhere he couldn't quite reach. Open your sight. The thought came unbidden. It felt like his own voice, but the cadence was wrong. The timing was wrong. See the true nature of what lies below. Leo tried to resist. He told himself to look away, to close his eyes. His will strained against the compulsion. But the pressure only grew stronger. It wrapped around his mind, squeezing, insisting, demanding.

He realized, with absolute certainty, that he was going to lose control. It was only a matter of time. Seconds, maybe. Less. Leo triggered the self-detonation. His Qi sea began to collapse. The process was instantaneous, a cascade failure that would erase his body from existence in a fraction of a heartbeat. In that fraction of a second, the corpse looked at him. It was hundreds of feet below, a speck at the center of the massive spherical chamber. But distance meant nothing to whatever remained of the Eternal.

The dried flesh of its face cracked and split as it turned. Empty eye sockets fixed on Leo with an awareness that should have been impossible. The mouth opened, jaw unhinging, and a roar emerged. A character burned itself into Leo's vision. Struggle. Leo self-detonated. [74: 59: 59]